What the Nazis of ‘Wolfenstein’ tell us about the futurists of Silicon Valley

JFK's "ask what you can do for your country" would also sound socialist to these people.

Fine, fine, bad turn of phrase- it's like you say, the vote is for the citizens who've finished their service (which is voluntary... except you don't get to vote without it, I think).

Really, I don't see why you need to doubt that Starship Troopers is one of my favourite Sci-Fi works ever or that I read it "carefully". I haven't read it in ten years, at least. Does that sound so uncommon to you? I also haven't read Consider Phlebas in at least that long, so I hardly remember the finer details of it (I seem to remember Horza was hit by a train he derailed...?) and it sure blurs in my mind with other Iain M. Banks stuff- but I do remember very well the effect those books had on me when I read them. And there's few works I remember enjoying that much.

Sheesh. Happy now? What happened to "Assume good faith"? Or not insinuating people haven't read the (article)?

>> In that context, it's the powered armour and the bugs that are the "convincing fluff in an already interesting" speculative portrait of an alternative to universal-franchise democracy.

OK no. Because the book goes all the way off-world, where the war with the bugs takes place and gets down to detailed descriptions of fighting. If the war was not the focus and its purpose was just to create an ambience, it would only be alluded to, never directly described- it would be a McGuffin, a ploy to allow Heinlein to talk about his future society. Instead, the descriptions of the fighting, and the ships and the power(ed) armour and the bugs are detailed and engrossing -and have influenced much SciFi imagery after them because of that (like, hey, Warhammer40K space marines in power armour).

If the war with the bugs was only alluded to, or otherwise did not take center stage, then yeah, I'd agree it was fluff, used to paint a portrait of a (grim) dark future etc. But when it's the main content of most of the book, no. I don't see it your way.

No objection of course to the fact that Heinlein would never just write a pure action romp, without any attempt at painting a fuller picture of the future.

> the extension of the franchise to women .... have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron."

On the other hand, in the update, he seems to suggest that voting doesn't matter. I find that confusing. Why even establish causality in the original essay if there is no such causality as seemingly described in the edit?

> It may be more confusing if you're one of those people who thinks that government intervention is the One True Solution to every single problem that troubles the human race.

It might be helpful to not assume too many things from one sentence :)

My read is that Card (like a few other Mormon SF writers I can think of) is:

1) seriously invested in religion, especially but not exclusively his own religion, and absolutely unwilling to simply dismiss it 2) genuinely interested in social justice 3) struggling to resolve this conflict

This comes out strongly in questions about the tension between collective action and individualist conscience. And it's also pretty tightly-wound in the tension between churchly homophobia on the one hand, and on the other, compassion and empathy and respect for the sovereignty of the individual whenever possible.

I suspect that when one says that Card "is [clearly] a far-right reactionary", you're likely to be oversimplifying to the point of uselessness. Indeed, I suspect that in general, that description is unlikely to tidily fit very many people in the world. But on the other hand, I believe it's useful and accurate to say "some of Card's beliefs seem consonant with a deep connection to a reactionary ideology".

EG as anti-fascist text: Buggers represent a perceived existential threat. Humanity gets together and forms a single government which lives on past the threat. The first criticism of the new world order is in the very beginning, in which you learn that Ender is the son of parents of a persecuted religious minority sect that wants to have more than the allotted number of children (I read this as a libertarian viewpoint). The biggest anti-fascist gut punch comes when you see things from the Queen's perspective: "'The humans did not forgive us,' she thought. 'We will surely die.'" It turns out that the entire coordinated militaristic response was premised on misunderstanding and inability to communicate. Had only the humans had empathetic, loving leaders like Ender, they would have understood the Buggers, and vice versa, and no war; I read the book as being about tragic misunderstanding, and how reasonable responses to those misunderstandings can lead to Xenocide. But I do not think this functions as an argument for a stronger state.

I also don't want to defend Card's out-of-book positions or much of the Shadow series. I just think Ender's Game itself holds up really well as a stand-alone piece of fiction.

My 2 cents, the books are symbolically rich and I appreciate that there are pieces of evidence I've ignored or forgotten about that would put it in a very different light.

I'm attempting to write obliquely to limit spoiler effect.

But yeah, of course #2/#3 is the reason Ender's Game is so massively popular. But also notice that's not what the author thought he'd written (ha ha, so much for genius).

I mean, notice that Card thinks that SftD and Xenocide are the natural sequels to the important themes of Ender's Game, but 99% of his commercial audience (including me at the age when I first read SftD) thought they were unrelated and unrelatable, and preferred the Shadow sequence. But Card took over a decade to go for it and write the first Shadow book, Ender's Shadow (1999, 13 years after SftD, which only took a year after Ender's Game).

Ender's Game is pro-facist the way Robocop is pro-police-state. (And yeah, when I saw Robocop in my teens, I thought it was pro-police-state. sigh.)